Caroline’s original post at Uncool and Amber Rhea’s excellent post today have me thinking about desire, sexuality, the body, and of course power dynamics. (read ‘em, because I’ll be referring to them a lot.)

Well, more so than I already do.

Because, as Amber noted, images of women who are scantily clad are almost always perceived as sexual. Women’s skin on display equals sex, or the offer of sex, as was discussed over at Uncool. It is never perceived as something that THEY want. Clothing that we choose to wear is assumed to be because of men, the decision to dance, to even walk down the street alone in less than completely covering garb is inviting the gaze. (Possibly NSFW below, just so’s you know.)

As a commenter at Uncool noted, men are usually perceived as the performers of sex, while women ‘are’ sex. That is, sexual or sexy images of women are enjoyed by men AND women while sexy images of men are somehow an automatic turnoff to men while still possibly sexy to women.

Laura Mulvey’s theories on film posit that men take pleasure in looking and women take pleasure in identifying. (which I see flipped in sports, BTW). So women are always the object of the “male gaze” and are always sexual, while men never are.

Of course, some of that has to do with power structure. With movies being made by male-owned studios and for male audiences. Some movies do reverse it, though. Thelma & Louise, with the scenes of Brad Pitt’s body…well, that’s a female gaze if I ever saw one (Ridley Scott, thank you). Back in college, I wrote a paper about Gilda, with Rita Hayworth, and I wasn’t the only person who had noticed that in that film, there are at least as many scenes of Glenn Ford as sex object as there are of Hayworth.

That leads me to another point that bothered me a wee bit in the comment at Uncool. I think that saying that all images that are sexual are somehow gendered feminine is the part that’s reinforcing the binary. Granted that in Gilda, Glenn Ford’s character is feminized by his relationship with his boss, but in Thelma and Louise, I would call it a female gaze.

There’s that whole (crap) theory that women just don’t get aroused visually, but I think that’s a lie for a lot of us and we just don’t get offered the stimulation as much.

The idea that sexual power, sexual agency, and sexual desire is inherently somehow masculine is just wrong, and it erases a whole landscape of female desires.

Looking at something in a sexual manner does not inherently bring power relations into it. There are certain ways that one can react to sexual arousal or thoughts that do involve power relations–catcalling, grabbing, being generally pushy and obnoxious, or commenting that a woman must be a “slut” if she wears a certain thing…yeah. Those all involve power and trying to subordinate one person to one’s own feelings.

But I am female, and I am looking at a picture of Johnny Depp and thinking about the filthy things I’d like to get up to with him, I’m not thinking about it in terms of power relations at all. I’m just thinking I’d like to play.

I’m with Caroline on the point that penetration does not equal power, and that people who get caught up in the physical dynamics of sex..well, that comes from the same place as lots of transphobia and homophobia. If sex is all about the equipment involved, if it only counts as sex when there’s penetration…you get my drift, I hope.

I’m a heterosexual woman, so hell yes I like looking at men. I enjoy sex with men. Does it only count as feminist sex if I get on top? If I get off? if he goes down on me?

I got terribly offended  by a commenter a while back I forget where, who said that as a gay man, he identified more with female sexuality–which he characterized as being the receiver of penetration. Great to have my entire sexuality characterized as being fucked. That’s a wee bit overly simplistic, eh?

Sex is like art for me in that way. I can write about politics and theory all I want, but when I’m trying to write something creative it’s got to come from inspiration, not from theory. And when I’m having sex (or thinking about sex) it doesn’t come from a place of analysis, it comes from desire.

I may be attracted to men who are bigger than me (usually) but that doesn’t mean that I’m attracted to some sort of inherently unequal power in our relationship. And certainly not in our sex lives.

Dw3t-Hthr noted that there’s a difference between power relations in D/s relations and in general. I think that most importantly, kink is something mutually agreed to from the beginning by both partners, so that to have a good D/s relationship, you have to in actuality have a very healthy egalitarian mindset to agree to the imbalance of power. You can’t eroticize the difference in power unless it is on some level artificial

So back to where I started from: the presumption of sexuality in images of women. The difference  between the large amount of sexualized images of women and the small amount of sexualized images of men, and the treatment of women’s bodies as always sexual (unless they don’t fit into a certain set of rules, but that’s a whole other post or series of posts). These things, of course, come from  a patriarchal society.

They do not mean that sex is inherently unequal, that visual pleasure is a male thing, and that erotic images are all gendered female. They do mean that for the vast majority of recorded history, male pleasure has been the only thing that has been valued, and so the world has been structured around it, and many men still react as though everything is there for them.

The difference for us over here in sex-positive-feminist land, I guess, is that we don’t believe these things are built in. That just because some of us like men, that some of us are sex workers, that some of us are submissive, doesn’t mean that inequality or abuse are inherent.

And just because this is sexy as hell, doesn’t mean it’s gendering him feminine:

Vinny Lecavalier, Tampa Bay Lightning.